Johannes Boris Borowski: choral cycle setting Woolf’s The Waves
Composer Johannes Boris Borowski has recently turned increasingly to writing for the human voice. In February, his new choral cycle based on Viriginia Woolf, commissioned by the SWR Vocal Ensemble, receives first performances in Stuttgart and Amsterdam.
The world premiere of Johannes Boris Borowski’s new choral cycle The Waves, setting texts by Virginia Woolf, takes place on 22 February at the Evangelische Kirche in Stuttgart-Gaisburg. The SWR Vocal Ensemble under the direction of Marcus Creed repeats the programme the following day in Schwäbisch Hall and gives the Dutch premiere on 27 February at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam.
The Waves was an experimental novel by Virginia Woolf published in 1931, which combines narrative, theatrical and lyrical elements. Borowski has distilled nine poems from Woolf's often poetically rhythmic prose. They form the basis for nine a cappella choral miniatures lasting 15 minutes in total, which trace the associative space and sonority found in the novel. They make use of a variety of compositional techniques, from homophonic to undulating and dialogue-like parts to Sprechgesang, sometimes fanning out into up to six voices per group - also derived from Woolf's text.
Johannes Boris Borowski explains in an interview with SWR editor Martina Seeber how “in the novel there are six characters in all, three men and three women, who take turns speaking or thinking, but who also form something like a large composite personality. It could also be a single person writing about their life, about situations and different areas of their bodily frame and humanity.” The composer's respect for and fascination with Woolf's word art is evident in the deliberately transparent treatment of the ‘choral body’, which allows the text to remain comprehensible to the listener: “Similar to listening to music, when I read The Waves I am thrown into a stream of thoughts, thoughts of the characters with whom I mingle.” By describing sensory perceptions, impressions of nature, associations and philosophical reflections, the entire span of a human life is traversed from childhood to a final ‘O Death!’.
The composer comments on the writer’s musicality and playfulness: “Virginia Woolf develops many structures from the idea of sound. If you read the texts aloud, the individual movements relate to each other in terms of sound. And then she creates transitions to poetry in this novel, but it still remains a great narrative text, it remains prose. And although she sometimes describes existential, even brutal things, she does so with a lightness of touch. As with children at play: they are also brutal in the way they play. The game does not exclude harshness, but it does allow a distance in dealing with it, which can of course be both positive and negative.”
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Prior to the performances of The Waves, another vocal composition by Johannes Boris Borowski is premiered on 13 and 14 February in concerts by Ensemble Aventure in Freiburg and Mannheim: Dreh dich nicht um is a kind of three-part ‘scena’ for soprano and piano based on Borowski’s own poetry.
The composer is currently working on further works for voice, including an extensive solo cycle based on texts by the American poet Sara Teasdale. The first excerpts from the cycle can be found, interspersed with other works, on the recorded collection ‘Wishes’, recently released by Genuin, featuring soprano Lisa Florentine Schmalz, clarinettist Boglárka Pecze and pianist Mariana Popova (Genuin GEN25885d).
> Further information on Work: The Waves
Photo: © Martin Becker